Edward W. Said

Edward Said was born into a Palestinian Christian family in Jerusalem in 1935. Although both Said’s parents had been born in the Ottoman Empire, the entire family was granted United States citizenship following his father’s voluntary service for the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. Said’s family left Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1947-1949 Palestine War, first relocating to Egypt and then to America. Although he struggled with disciplinary issues in high school, Said was successful in secondary education, receiving his BA in English literature from Princeton, and a Master’s and PhD from Harvard. Said became a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 1963, where he remained for his entire career. Trained primarily as a literary critic, Said became a public intellectual with the publication of Orientalism in 1978. This book became one of the foundational documents of the new scholarly discipline of Post-Colonial Studies, which seeks to understand the long-term social, political, and cultural consequences of colonialism and imperialism on formerly colonized societies. Said was also a vocal advocate of Palestinian resistance, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War. Said’s anti-Zionist positions and his critique of U.S. foreign policy, especially as it related to the Middle East and Islam, as well as his intellectual critiques of well-established and influential Orientalist scholars in Orientalism, made him a controversial figure. During his life, his political stances drew the attention of the FBI and resulted in numerous death threats and attempts to oust him from his academic position; once his office at Columbia University was even firebombed. Said died in 2003 at the age of 67, following a long battle with leukemia.